Lala music cloud gets new player, gifts, mix playlists, more

Lala lets you stream your music catalog from the Web, and a round of new and …

Lala, a streaming music service and DRM-free store that keeps your music library in the cloud, has gotten an update that gives it a polished look and some key new features. In addition to these improvements, the company has also hopped on the music discovery bandwagon, boosting its potential as a one-stop shop for almost all of your music needs.

Lala changed the music equation last October by introducing unlimited streaming access to all the songs you already own in addition to providing a cheap DRM-free MP3 store. With this redesign, Lala has greatly improved its Web-based player to provide desktop-like features. Album art is displayed next to each track as it plays, and a snap back button allows you to quickly return to the page where you found the song. New buttons allow for instant access to your queue of upcoming songs and provide the ability to quickly add the currently playing song to any playlist. All this makes for a much more functional, enjoyable player that is accessible from anywhere in the Lala site, no matter where you navigate.

In recent months, Lala has also gained a number of other enhancements, such as a comprehensive music search box on its homepage and a Music Feed that displays friends' activity and news about artists in your collection. Lala users can also buy gift cards for each other, directly gift a track as a Web song (unlimited streaming for 10�) or MP3 download, purchase an entire playlist of Web songs, and get a Web album for free when purchasing a physical CD (remember those?).

Even Lala's embeddable Web player has received some enhancements, like an updated look and the ability to embed entire albums, playlists, or an artist's top songs. The site has also received some UI changes in this recent redesign, with navigation that has been shifted to drop-down menus which sit below the player.

One of my favorite Bonobo songs is embedded in a Lala Flash song widget above

The company is also experimenting with a few beta features. Facebook Connect allows users to share certain activity back to their Facebook profiles, and Last.fm scrobbling will share each played track with your Last.fm account. If you want in on the features, sign into your account preferences, go to the Beta section, and use the contact form there to ask the company for access.

The last of Lala's new additions is "Mix it up," a discovery feature that lets you quickly create a mix playlist of music similar to any artist. Visit an artist's page (or simply search from the main page) and hit the "Mix it up" button to generate a playlist. Ars spoke with John Kuch of Lala's Business Development about how Lala builds its recommendations. According to Kuch, they're based on a variety of factors, like what your friends are listening to and what the general community is buying. Different kinds of activity weigh differently in Lala's discovery algorithm, however. Tracks that users add to their online collection from home or by purchasing the Web song have one level of influence, while songs that are purchased as MP3 downloads weigh more heavily on the recommendation scale.

Mix playlists can be created from any artist's page or by using a search drop-down menu

It has been about six months since Lala introduced its music library in the cloud feature, and Kuch shared some interesting statistics about the company and its users' behavior. Lala has nearly 6.5 million tracks in its catalog now (though users are still allowed to upload their own if Lala's Music Match software cannot find what they are looking for), and the company is powered by 30 people, only five of whom do not write code.

While Kuch could not share hard user numbers, he did say that the new two-punch system of cheap, unlimited streaming Web songs and purchasable DRM-free MP3s is enjoying an 18 percent conversion rate. That is, for every 100 songs that a user listens to (either by streaming once for free or purchasing as a Web song), he or she buys 18 of them.

Kuch could not share details on Lala's streaming rights contracts with the labels. He could only mention that "we have a very unique licensing structure that allows us to do this."

Though Lala's redesign today is not quite revolutionary, it tops off a series of recent enhancements that maintain the company's position at the forefront of the Web music market. The company is making music more social in subtle new ways, and the enhanced player and site make it more appealing than ever to put your entire library in Lala's cloud.

9 Reader Comments

I heart Lala. I have been using the site since the beginning when it was a CD swapping service and I have loved the evolution into a music streaming, MP3 purchasing, and (still, though not nearly as active as it used to be) CD-swapping service. My suggestion to anyone who hasn't heard of it or used it is to sign up. You get 50 free streaming credits just for signing up (or you used to). Their MP3 prices are typically lower than iTunes or Amazon if you want to purchase. Overall, I cannot recommend it enough.

It's the only way i listen to music at work, since my iPod Nano won't hold my entire music collection.

Also, since I tend to spend most of my time in places with an easily-accessible Internet connection, I find myself purchasing less and less music, while buy the web-only versions more. Perhaps a model like Lala's is where music consumption will be in a few year. Who knows?

I strongly recommend using Lala. I have been using it for a few months now and I really like how its grown. New updates make the website look much cleaner. One of the best changes isn't mentioned in the article, which you can now view your entire collection with out having to page over constantly. I still find it easier to simply play music after finding it in the store side which is very convenient to navigate and play full CDs. Plus, full song previews is the best thing to happen to legal music purchasing. No more relying on 30 seconds of a 5 minute song to make your decision.

I am also a LaLa.com fan, although I don't use the internet streaming features. The prices are very competive and the quality of the downloads is high, and my experience with customer service has been fantastic.

But for me the real draw is the ability to stream any song in it's entirety once. You can really check out any song before buying it, which doesn't make me buy less, it makes me buy MORE.

I would love to see them develop a better recommendation system. It's not bad now, and it works better for me than Last.fm ever did. Still, since I don't listen to mainstream pop, good recommendation helps me find new music. LaLa.com is welcome to part me from as much money in my wallet as they can get if they can point me to new artists I like!

Maybe they could have an optional for-pay recommendation engine based on licensing the Music Genome Project that powers Pandora. This could provide users with a proven-excellent recommendation engine, and give Pandora some badly-needed income from licensing fees.